BY ALICE BROWN One of the first articles published by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2022 asked, “Who Wants to Be a College President?” Author Eric Kelderman writes that recent changes in higher education have led to a shift in the qualities boards seek in a new president. One change he describes is that…
BY DAVID A. VAREL When I was an undergraduate at a liberal arts college in the early 2000s, our student evaluations were all qualitative. We were asked to write short essays describing our experience in our courses—what worked, what didn’t, what could be improved. It was clear from this design that the chief audience was…
BY FRANK E. RITTER AND DONALD A. DONAHUE We will need to continue to protect ourselves from COVID-19, probably through spring 2022. Colleges and universities have long been recognized as places of increased risk for communicable diseases. While higher education has benefited from immunization mandates against “childhood diseases” in primary and secondary schools, they have…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a January 2018 political philosophy class at Shawnee State University in Ohio Professor Nicholas Meriwether addressed a trans woman as “sir.” It was an accident, but when the student approached him after class to request that she be called “Ms.” like other women in the class, Meriwether refused, claiming that his…
BY NATE HOLDREN Faculty members are exhausted. That’s no surprise given that we are overworked in a distressing world. I’ve begun to suspect there’s an additional factor in our exhaustion, which I call “moral distress,” and which administrators are worsening without realizing it. Several commentators have talked about medical workers facing moral injury. That’s when…
BY JONATHAN PORITZ AND JONATHAN REES When we wrote about “Academic Freedom in Online Education” for the winter 2021 Academe released this month, we tried hard not to focus too much on the pandemic. While many faculty members have only come to online education because COVID-19 has made it unsafe to teach in any physical…
BY OGNJEN Š. MILJANIĆ The start of vaccinations against COVID-19 has brought hope that the pandemic’s end is near. Over the coming months, as things return to normal, many of the changes brought about by the pandemic will be reversed. I will be glad to see my kids return to their physical school, which will…
BY MICHAEL JANIS In the last four years, the increase in discrimination and racism in the United States has taken many forms, from unchecked police brutality to the rise in hate crimes and in blatant sexist and white supremacist rhetoric. As a professor, since 2003, at Morehouse College, one of the nation’s oldest historically Black…
BY DAVID A. VAREL These days, as any job seeker will tell you, universities are prioritizing diversity on their faculties. The way they are conceptualizing it has expanded dramatically over time, now including not only race and gender but also sexual orientation, disability, military service, and many other categories. Yet one omission is especially striking:…